The hearts of small galaxies may hide a mysterious kind of black hole that has long proved elusive: medium-size black holes with masses between the mass of a few suns and that of millions of suns, a new study finds.
Over the decades, astronomers have detected many examples of two kinds of black holes: stellar-mass black holes and supermassive black holes. Stellar-mass black holes are up to a few times the sun's mass and are thought to arise when giant stars die and collapse in on themselves, whereas supermassive black holes are millions to billions of times the sun's mass and form the hearts of most, if not all, large galaxies.
Much remains unknown about the origins of supermassive black holes; they seem to have grown extraordinarily fast and appeared early in cosmic history, but researchers don't know exactly how. One theory involves intermediate-mass black holes — those with masses between 100 and 1 million solar masses — that previous research suggested might serve as the middle stages between stellar-mass and supermassive black holes. However, evidence for these missing linksremains scant.
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